open('data.txt', 'r')

# In R there are many custom functions for reading files, but many of
# them are essentially wrappers for read.table() and can be ignored.

# Basic syntax using read.table():
data = read.table('/path/to/filename.extension', header=FALSE, 
                  sep="delimiter", skip=integer, nrows=integer,
                  row.names=row_names, col.names=column_names)
# Where:
#	- The above parameters are some of the most useful in read.table()
#	- Only the '/path/to/filename.extension' argument is required. It
#		can also be a complete URL to a file
#	- The header default is TRUE
#	- sep default is 'white space', which is one or more spaces, tabs, 
#		newlines or carriage returns but it can be used to specify any 
#		field delimiter e.g.: '\t' ',' '|' ';' and etc
#	- skip is the number of rows to skip when reading the file
#	- nrows is the maximum number of rows to read
#	- row.names and col.names are optional vectors of names that can be 
#		used for the row or column names